It serves a body politic good to hover above our amber waves of grain to get a bird’s eye view of the “accomplishments” of Democrats. Democrat idols and ideologies are dropping like cow pies, and yet for some baffling reason, Americans continue to follow Dems even with their feet covered in excrement and stinkin’ up, well, everything.
This week we saw Paul Ehrlich, the butterfly scientist whose excremental book The Population Bomb Boomers were forced to read in college.
Fancying himself a population prophet, Ehrlich terrified doomsday leftists with his environmental alarmism and terrified conservatives with his authoritarian proposals to control reproduction by any means the omniscient Ehrlich deemed necessary. Here are just some nuggets of Ehrlich’s fool’s gold:
• “We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
• “We must have a responsible-parenthood law of our own, preferably coupled with compulsory birth control, as soon as we can get it.”
• “The law would have to be quite specific: no more than two children to a family.”
• “The first step should probably be to set up a system of incentives for voluntary sterilization. We could, for example, offer a ‘bonus’ of $500 to any man who undergoes a vasectomy. …”
• “We must change our tax laws so that they discourage rather than encourage reproduction. At the moment, we actually reward people for having children. … This should be reversed by eliminating the $600 exemption for each child.”
• “If the voluntary methods finally fail, then we may have to resort to ‘luxury’ taxes on certain items, such as diapers, cribs, and toys, and perhaps even a ‘head tax’ on children.”
• “A much more effective way would be the addition of temporary sterilants to the water supply or to staple foods. This is technically difficult at the moment, but the possibility should be explored.”
• “The sterilant would be antagonized by a ‘pill’ which would be taken by those who were permitted to have children.”
This is the kind of tyrannical control that Dems favor but often cloak in paternalistic rhetoric of compassion. In the late sixties when Ehrlich was writing, though, he felt no pressure to deceive and so hadn’t mastered the art of sophistry that Dems eventually realized was necessary to accomplish their despotic agenda.
So, Ehrlich wrote eye-popping things like this:
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to cutting out the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.
To leftist Ehrlich and his hordes of disciples, humans are cancers that need to be cut out.
Despite the frightening implications of his pseudo-scientific predictions, his ideas spread like a cancer that should have been cut out.
The first edition of The Population Bomb was released in 1968 in hopes of influencing the presidential election. According to a 2018 article published by Smithsonian Magazine, Ehrlich’s book “contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world,” influencing “The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund … and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places.”
Smithsonian Magazine describes the fruit of leftist Ehrlich’s malignant ideas:
In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh. …
In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone.
And then in 1979 came China’s “one-child policy.” Chinese Communist aerospace engineer and weapons designer Song Jian was introduced to and became enamored of population control ideas, including Ehrlich’s. Song was influential in accelerating the implementation of the one-child policy that resulted in horrors that still haunt China.
A 2018 article published by the Cato Institute summarized the tragic consequences of another leftist idea exported around the world:
The consequences were tragic, millions of sterilisations and abortions, many of them forced. Families who committed the grave crime of having more than one child could be forced to pay fines many times more than their annual income. The family size limits, combined with a cultural preference for sons over daughters, have also led to female infanticide, sex-selective abortions and a highly skewed gender ratio.
Ehrlich is not the only leftist icon whose cankered halo was knocked loose this week.
On March 18, 2026, the New York Times reported that leftist idol and Saul Alinskyite community organizer Cesar Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls as young as 12 when he was in his forties. In addition, he “also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification.” In fact, idol Chavez had four out-of-wedlock children with three women who worked for his organization.
While some of the victims concealed the abuse for decades, many allegations were known and hidden by Chavez’s relatives and the United Farm Workers Union.
The New York Times revealed the extent of the evidence supporting the claim that Chavez was a creep:
[The victims’] accounts were corroborated, in part, by interviews with more than 60 top aides, union members and relatives, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and contemporaneous audio recordings.
There are 86 public schools in the United States named after Chavez, including the Cesar E. Chavez Multicultural Academic Center, which includes two campuses in Chicago.
There are an estimated 50-60 streets, roads, and highways named after Chavez. There are monuments, public statues, memorials, and busts of or to him, including the bust that Joe Biden shuffled as fast as he could to install behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
Now that Chavez’s dirty little not-so-secret has burst onto the cultural scene, leftists are scrambling to memory-hole Chavez. What should be noted is that relatives and union members knew about his misogynistic abuse of women and power and yet said nothing as memorials, tributes, t-shirts, posters, and celebrity endorsements of Chavez multiplied.
Here’s the United Farm Workers incredible—as in not credible”—response:
The UFW has learned of deeply troubling allegations that one of the union’s co-founders, Cesar Chavez, behaved in ways that are incompatible with our organization’s values. Some of the reports are family issues, and not our story to tell or our place to comment on. Far more troubling are allegations involving abuse of young women or minors. Allegations that very young women or girls may have been victimized are crushing.
The UFW just learned of these “crushing” allegations about “one” of the union’s co-founders. Yeah, that’s the ticket; the UFW is crushed.
Through idols and ideologies, leftists abuse power and trust as they destroy all that is good and true.